Mindhive : Photos

Slow News Day

Well, it's a slow news day, so here are some random panoramic sky shots. Despair ! Also note that, as always, if you want Zazzle posters of any of these photos, all you need to do is ask (via comments). Despair !

PAX 2004

So, as both my blog readers probably know, I went to the Penny Arcade Expo (a.k.a. PAX) last weekend, with my sister Sveta. I've never been to a gaming convention of this magnitude before, so I was quite excited. Additionally, my sister won the coveted chance to compete in the Omegathon -- the penultimate gaming tournament, encompassing a wide spectrum of games, from the tabletop Diceland to the shiny Mario Kart Double Dash. Not wanting to be left out, I also signed up for the Soul Calibur 2 tournament. It's not as cool (Omegathon contestants are called Omeganauts, whereas I am just called "that guy"), but it has Kilik, so it all evens out in the end, right ?

Anyways, due to administrative mishaps and generally poor planning on my part, this PAX trip was way, way too expensive and hectic; still, this was the most fun I've had in a while. I've posted a few photos on my site (not all of which are linked from this post), but sadly (for my blog loyalists), I was too busy actually doing stuff to document everything properly.

Update: Sveta posted her own PAX report; you can read it here.

Arrival

Agitated GamersWe arrived in Bellevue, Washington on Friday night, a day before PAX. Unfortunately, due to a grueling flight (consumer tip: if you lose your bag, don't ask United for help, they'll just give you a three-hour runaround, until the janitor guy, America West, and the Port Police take pity on you), and unfamiliar motel surroundings, I was exhausted the next day -- especially since we had to get to the Meydenbauer Convention Center bright and early at 9:00 am. On the plus side, we had this cool GPS in our rental car, albeit with a scary female voice (why anyone would implement a GPS unit and not give it the computer voice from Mechwarrior 2 is beyound me).

Anyway, arriving at the convention center was a bit of a shock, especially for my sister. She kept saying: "ohmygod ohmygod... that guy looks like you ! And that one ! They all look like you ! It's so scary !" As for my part, I felt as though I've been transported to some fantasy world... I wasn't even aware that this many gamers existed in our Universe at all; seeing them all at once was simply overwhelming (but in a good way). Since as we arrived about 30 minutes too early (thanks to the scary GPS cyber-lady), about to keel over from starvation, we went to look for food. The following conversation ensued:

Sveta: Ohmygod... those people look like you, too !
Bugmaster: They have Subway bags. Let's ask them. *approaches the gamers*
Bugmaster: Hey guys, you here for the convention ?
Gamers: Yeah !
Bugmaster: Where'd you get the food ?
Gamers: There's a Subway right around the corner.
Bugmaster: *pumps both fists into the air* Sw33t ! Food !
Gamers: *all pump fists into the air* Yeah ! Food ! *wave goodbye and walk off*.
Sveta: Oh... my... god... you cheered for food ! And then they cheered for food ! All of you... you cheered for food ! I... I can't believe you cheered ! And then they cheered ! Aaaugh !

Now that's what I call a life-altering experience.

LinuxWhen we came back and finished our food, the overall excitement level was already on the rise: it was 09:00 am, but the doors were still closed. My sister was promptly whisked away by a PAX Enforcer to the über-secret Omeganaut meeting; I stood in line and snapped photos. From time to time, the doors would open a crack, people at the front of the line would cheer, and then the doors would slam shut again. Occasionally, a random SUV would drive by on the road; the looks on the drivers' faces were priceless. In any case, eventually the doors opened for real, and we got in to the convention center. w00t !

The place was simply packed -- and more people were arriving each second. From what I understand, Gabe and Tycho expected a turnout of at most 1000 people, but in fact, about 2000 people showed up. I usually don't feel too comfortable in crowds, but that wasn't the case at PAX. All the Trogdor shirts and GameSkins, people with Gamecube controllers worn around their necks like amulets, small parties saying things like "yeah it's 236+B but it's blockable"... They made me feel right at home.

Exhibition Room

WarmachinesI had a few minutes before the first round of the Omegathon (Diceland), so I checked out the exhibition room (and loaded up on free stuff). Here's some of the stuff that was shown there:

• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time 2: They only had a video trailer of the game, not a playable demo. I'm not sure how I feel about it... The "original" game (meaning, Sands of Time 1), as I'd mentioned before, was excellent. The new game seems to be a bit flashier -- watching the Prince jump in the air and scissor the enemies' heads off with twin scimitars was very cool -- but it also seems to be more action-oriented. Sure, action is sw33t, but this isn't why I like the Prince of Persia series. Jumping heroes are a dime a dozen nowadays, but masterful level design, fluid character animation, laconic yet touching story, and the sheer essence of elegance -- those qualities are becoming increasingly hard to find. Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

• The Matrix Online: I had mixed feelings when I heard news about this game. On the one hand, the idea is almost apocalyptic in its grandiose outlook: the Massively Multiplayer RPG, about the Matrix, set in a persistent online world... They've implemented the Matrix itself ! And it sucks out your money, not body heat, so it's actually feasible !.. well, but, on the other hand, the second and third movies were pretty bad (who am I kidding, the last one was atrocious), and bullet-time would be pretty hard to implement in an MMORPG setting. Anyway, I was expecting something lame, and I wasn't disappointed. The Matrix Online is, as far as I can tell, yet another real-time RPG with turn-based combat, just like City of Heroes, but not as cool. There's no bullet-time, your character just moves too fast for you to see when you click the "move fast" button. You get to walk around a lot, kick people occasionally, blah blah blah. We've seen it all before, we don't need another reminder.

• Guild Wars: Another MMORPG from the creators of City of Heroes. I had the following conversation with the exhibitor guy:

  PlayNC: ...so you see, all the missions are instanced, so instead of all the people being in the world at once, it's just you and your friends. This creates a unique personal experience :-)
  Bugmaster: So this is not really a Massively multiplayer online game now, is it ? It's just an 8-way LAN game, basically, but on the Internet ?
  PlayNC: Er... Uh... well, the towns are massive.
  Bugmaster: Thanks. Bye.
  

  Bah.

• Warmachine: This one is actually pretty cool. Warmachine is a miniature-based tabletop game (basically, a Warhammer ripoff) by Privateer Press, set in the world of Iron Kingdoms -- a D&D supplement based on steampunk and magitech. If you know me, you know that a mere whiff of steam-powered giant mecha is enough to get me gibbering about "Machines !" for hours -- and these guys had an actual demo game going ! I liked the miniatures, and I even understood the quickstart rules (I understood enough of them to figure out why my opponent wiped the floor with me), and I bought the rulebook; still, it's the D&D supplement which I'm really interested in. Miniature-based games are simply too expensive and time-consuming (and besides, I can't paint my way out of a paper bag). Unfortunately, the character guide is not out yet, so I have no idea how good the writing is. It did disturb me, though, that the exhibitor guy kept referring to the setting -- the world, the story, the faction histories, etc. -- as "fluff". If that's "fluff", then what's the point of roleplaying at all ? To roll as many dice as possible ? I know this is D&D, but still. Anyway, I haven't read the Warmachine book yet, so I'll reserve final judgement until then.

• Fable: A freeform RPG, more Morrowind than Morrowind itself, the ability to be good, evil, or anything in between, a world which responds to the choices you make... I usually try to stay as skeptical as possible, but in this case, the hype is simply too powerful. I've seen only a little bit of Fable, but from what I've seen, it looks like a game made specifically for the little RPG fanatic inside me. Unfortunately, I am not going to buy an overpriced low-end PC with a bear-shaped controller -- a.k.a. the X-Box -- just to play this one game. Maybe I'll rent one or something.

There were a few other games demoed in the Exhibition Room -- Conker's Bad Fur something or other, Doom 3 (darkness, now with pipes !), and some sort of a trading card game -- but they didn't seem too interesting, and thus I walked off to watch my sister play Diceland in the Omegathon.

Omegathon

Diceland Round
Halo Round 1: Diceland. Diceland is a weird dice-based game that no one has ever heard of until PAX. Still, it looks kind of interesting. Basically, you have these octahedral dice, with stats printed on each side. You throw the die onto the table; whatever side the die lands on determines how strong it is. You can move dice around by pushing on the printed green dots, and, of course, you can shoot enemy dice (if they're in your FoV) and deal damage to them, by pushing on the red dots. From what I could tell, the game is pretty cool: sort of a poor man's combo of Warhammer and Magic: The Gathering. But with dice. From what I heard, though, the Blue dice have lost at every table, so word to the wise: don't use Blue.

Round 2: Halo. This was the X-Box version; my sister and I practiced it a bit, but we're not big fans of console-based FPSs in general, and the X-Box in particular, so it was touch and go for a while. Still, Sveta shot people in the head with the rest of the Omeganauts, following up with tasty grenades and severe needler beatings. The strongest player - Sean - came in at 50 frags, with 35 frags being the next highest score; all the other players came in at about 10 to 20. My sister and her team made it in, though.

Round 3: Mario Kart Double Dash. Bah ! I didn't get to see this one; I was simply too exhausted to push through the insane crowd of screaming fans. If you're reading this, Gabe & Tycho: get a bigger console room for next time ! In any case, I got to hear the events, as Sveta's team got three mushrooms and a star in a row, blasting their way from last place and into the winning bracket. W00t !

DDR Sveta
Doom Round 4: DDR. This actually happened the next day; but chronological order is for wussies so who cares. The DDR round was supposed to happen in the big theater, but no one wanted to lug the heavy machine down there, so we all had to crowd around in the corridor, instead. I am not actually a major fan of DDR (being a big fat geek and all), but I've got to admit, the competition was pretty cool. In the first round, one of the competitors -- Kevin -- walked onto the pad, clicked his music selection, and, with one fluid motion, ripped his pants off. Well, ok, so it was just the bottom sleeves of the pants, and they were on a zipper -- but still, the crowd went wild. Kevin defeated his opponent by a landslide, and it was my sister's turn. Her dance/battle wasn't as flashy, but it was much more tense -- Sveta and her opponent Josh E (who had his own official team, with T-shirts and everything) went neck-and-neck until the very end. Unfortunately, Josh E defeated her by a narrow margin of 5 points (218 vs. 213). He and his team were very cool about it, though, and took everyone out to lunch.

Round 5: Doom. That's right ! Doom. It was the old-skool Doom 1, too, with no mouse, no autoaim, no tricks -- just raw sk33lz. It brought back my fond memories of hanging out in the computer lab, playing deathmatch on mute during Pascal finals... Ah, these were the days. This, however, was Doom on a whole other level: a battle for the Omega Prize, to the death (well, to the most frags in 10 minutes, actually), amongst a crowd of supporters, most of them yelling advice. I was never a big fan of sports, but I imagine that this is how a soccer match in England might feel. The winner of the Doom round, Sean the Omeganaut, was phenomenal -- he shot his rockets with surgical precision that I could never achieve even with the mouse. There were rockets everywhere... I don't know how to describe it. Carnage.

The last round of the Omegathon was a secret; no one except Gabe and Tycho knew what it would entail, but everyone knew that it would be big. So, to keep up the suspense, I'll talk about my own exploits for a while.

Defeated Foe
Fighters Soul Calibur 2 Tournament: I actually pre-registered for this one, and, in fact, I spent most of PAX playing SC2, in the tournament and in free play. Unfortunately, the torunament was held on the X-Box. Spawn was banned, but this doesn't change the fact that many people were hit hard by the X-Box controller. Some people were smart, and brought adapters; I just had to suck it in and use the Tekken Stance of PS2 (the X-Box controller, though bear-sized, is similar in its layout). Unfortunately, most people in my initial bracket did not show up, and we were left with just three people. I brought out my Kilik, and made people fly (out of the ring and/or onto the floor). The battle was tough, but Kilik's staff was tougher, and I made it in Round 2. In Round 2, however, I've met my match. My opponent was calm, collected, and used a custom arcade-style controller, with a real joystick and Street Fighter-style buttons... It was intimidating just to look at it. He had the home field advantage, and I was fighting sleep deprivation, headache, cafeeine-induced delerium, and the X-Box controller. The result was nothing short of a spirit-crushing experience: he beat me six times in a row, Kilik and Nightmare both. What made the battle even more demoralizing is that he used Yoshimitsu, and he used him with an extreme level of skill. I've never seen Yoshimitsu used at all, let alone with such power... before I could blink, it was all over. If you're reading this, my nemesis, my hat goes off to you; next time, I shall be more prepared. Sorry I didn't get a chance to take your picture, there were crowds in the way.

After that, I sulked for a while, and then went off to check out the free play. What was interesting about the gamers at PAX is that none of them parried, and very few of them used throws. This was very different from my friends, who use parries and throws ALL THE TIME (you know who you are !), and thus I was able to hold my own quite well. In the end, I have once again met my match, in the person of the tournament semifinalist. His Ivy was just too strong, though I managed to defeat her a few times. Curse you, Ivy !

Counterstrike Tournament: Oh, I also signed up for CS, but that was a losing battle from the start. I was the best player on our team, and I haven't played for five years. Still, it was refreshing to see the old classic alive and well. Speaking of which, there was also a "Bring Your Own Computer" room at PAX; in there I saw someone playing Chrono Trigger on an emulator. Yes ! The legend will never die !

Tube
Gabe PA Q&A: I also got to attend the Penny Arcade Question and Answer session. That was quite a treat: Gabe and Tycho are excellent speakers, and they're even funnier in real life than they are online, if you can believe it. Oddly enough, their personalities are reversed in real life: Tycho is the talkative one, and Gabe is the quiet, reserved one (he seemed almost shy, and was impossible to corner). I did, however, manage to corner Tycho before the Q&A, and got him to sign my tube. He took one look at my short tube (I was reluctant to bring the full-sized one on the plane -- still, thanks for the advice, James !), and said, "well, that's nothing to be ashamed of". Aw ! Little did he know that I plan to attach this short tube to a longer, full-sized tube, thus forging the ultimate cardboard weapon ! Expect an update soon. Anyway, I didn't film most of the Q&A, because I was busy laughing so hard. At some point, someone asked, "how come American Greetings never returns my emails ?", and Tycho answered, "gee, I don't know. They've always been nice to us". They also mentioned the Phantom gaming console: "The phantom is not meant for us. Everyone sitting in this room, the Phantom is not meant for you, either. When you get married, the children and grandchildren of this union... the Phantom is not for them, either. But, somewhere on Earth, there's a guy that would like the Phantom. When it comes out, that guy will be all over it.". Oh, and Gabe and Tycho also showed an animated version of The Wandering Age: Last Rites. They said there'd be a DVD of the entire PAX coming out soon; it's worth buying just for this short animation; trust me.

Omegathon: Final Round. As I'd mentioned before, the final round of the Omegathon was a mystery. All we knew is that it was postponed by two hours due to "technical difficulties", and that (according to Tycho) it would require no special training, but pure gaming skills. I was able to squeeze into the theater along with my sister the Omeganaut (yey !), so I had a good seat. The lights went dim, and the only thing I saw was a green couch, with some sort of device under a cloth in front of it (facing the screen in the back of the stage). Then, Europe - The Final Countdown started playing, and Gabe and Tycho introduced the final contestants: Kevin of DDR fame (the crowd started chanting, "Take off your pants ! TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS !!!) and Sean the Doom master. They settled onto the couch -- this time, to the tune of Eye of the Tiger. Just as the room was about to explode, the cloth was torn off from the mysterious machine, and the screen lit up, to reveal... PONG ! And I mean the original, analog Pong machine with knobs. Only this Pong machine was hooked up to a couple studio-quality microphones, resulting in Pong with surround sound. All lights went off, someone from the theater yelled "this map sucks !", and the game started. It was incredible -- the tension felt as though it could've been cut with a knife. The little rectangular ball made a deep humming noise that followed it in 3d from left to right, right to left. People everywhere yelled words of encouragement, such as "stop camping !", "zerg rush him ! zerg rush !", and "good thing you ducked, or that woulda hit you". In the end, though, Sean was the better player, with the score 15-10.

I guess this is one of those "you had to be there" moments, but trust me: this game of Pong was, quite possibly, the most exciting event I've seen in my entire life. I don't know how Gabe and Tycho pulled it off, or where they dug up the machine, but they were right: these were pure gaming skills on display, raw and unchained.

Group ShotAfter the match was over, Tycho tried to remember some other event that he missed; but first, he and Gabe had to take their turn on the couch, because the roar of "PLAY PONG !" from the crowd was overwhelming. This time, Tycho was the better player, though it was obvious that both of them had put in quite a few hours of practice (or "beta-testing", as Gabe put it). After the game though, Tycho finally remembered what they'd been forgetting. They vacated the stage, and a guy from Australia (I think) named Dave walked up, faced the audience, and proposed to his fiancée: "Honey, I want you to be on my team". I've been to a wedding before, but this was much more touching.

Conclusion: There was actually a lot of stuff that I missed at the Omegathon. I missed out on the gaming industry panel, the D&D session, all of the tabletop free play (why did I not bring my Magic cards ? Why ????!!!), and, worst of all, the live music concert featuring The Minibosses. There simply wasn't enough time to do everything, and too many people to get everywhere. Still, PAX 2004 was incredible; if I make enough money, I'm definitely going to register for PAX 2005. I can't wait to see what secret surprises Penny Arcade has planned for next year.

Yosemite and the Lakes

Well, I do have some more things to write about, but that would require me to, you know, actually write. So, instead, I uploaded some more photos from my recent Yosemite trip. Gaze upon them, ye loyal blog readers, and despair. Despair !

Evil Kitty

Shopot reminds me of that kitty from Azumanga Daioh. He looks all sweet an innocent and purry, but as soon as you get close, *crunch* go his teeth on your extremeties. My father came up with the idea of photographing Shopot in action, but it turned out to be excessively difficult - due to Shopot's fur, which absorbs light at all frequencies, and his general bitey nature and demeanor. Still, here you go.

Yosemite Panoramas

Well, I still have about a gig of Yosemite photos to process. Most of them, though, are of the "look at this pretty flower" variety, so who cares. I did, however, manage to process a couple of panoramic shots, and they turned out surprisingly well (read: they actually worked in some minimal capacity). The panoramas were pretty easy to make, too.

Panoramas are created by panning the camera across the scene, and stitching the resulting photos together into a seamless whole. There are many kinds of panoramas out there (all of them cooler than mine). Most of them are true 360° panoramas that allow the viewer to spin all the way around in the scene in any direction; unfortunately, they require special equipment to shoot, and special software to view -- usually, QTVR. Thus, I have opted for the much simpler method: just stick all the images together into a huge linear photo.

Once upon a time, there was a sofware package called PanoTools that could be used to create panoramas of any kind. Unfortunately, this software package is now defunct (the previous link links to some auxillary files that are basically useless). ALso unfortunately, PanoTools was a command-line-only package; the GUI that came with it usually failed to load at all; when it did load, it just produced error messages. Fortunately, others have picked up where Helmut Dersch, the creator of PanoTools, left off.

I have tried out two different panorama creation packages, PTAssembler and PTGui. Both of them use a hacked version of command-line PanoTools as the engine; however, of the two, PTGui is superior by far. Here's what you'll need to do in order to install it:

1. Download and install PTGui's own version of PanoTools.
2. Download and install PTGui itself.
3. Run PTGui. It will pop up a very useful wizard, prompting you to create a new panorama. Close it for now, though.
4. Click Tools | Options, and select the "Directories & Files" tab. Make sure that the "PTStitcher application" box is set to the right thing; it should contain the full path to the PTStitcher.exe file that was installed when you installed PanoTools in step 1. Browse your hard drive and locate it manually if you need to.

Unfortunately, by itself, PTGui produces fairly terrible results (and so does PTAssembler). Fortunately (again), PTGui supports a third-party (from Berkeley, actually) tool called enblend, which can fix the stitching errors. Enblend andjusts the color/brightness parameters of each photo, completely erasing the seams between them; without it, your panorama will look like Frankenstein's monster. So, here are additional setup steps:

5. Download and install enblend. There's nothing to install really; just unzip enblend.exe to some folder.
6. In PTGui, click Tools | Options again, and select the "Plugins" tab. Enter the correct path into the "Enblend Directory" box, and type "-v" (without the quotes) into the "Command Line Arguments (optional)" box. The -v flag stands for "verbose"; without it, it's hard to tell what's going on.

You may also try AutoPano, which attempts to automatically create control points for your panoramas (more on this in a minute). Unfortunately, AutoPano did exactly nothing whenever I tried to get it to work, so eventually I just gave up on it.

Ok, now that you have PTGui installed, you should take some photos. Here is how I do it:

1. Lock exposure and white balance. Enblend can deal with mismatched exposure and WB to some extent, but it's not omnipotent.
2. Lock the zoom (or just don't change it). If you change the zoom, you might as well throw out your photos and start over.
3. Try and pick a subject that's a fair distance away, or, at least, a scene that has some distant features -- such as mountains on the horizon, trees at the edge of a clearing, etc. Features that are close to the camera will be affected by parallax; parallax is not your friend.
4. Rotate your camera a bit, take a picture, rotate it again, take a picture, etc. Make sure that your individual frames overlap by about 10-15%. Also, make sure to rotate your camera around only one axis; for example, if you're making a horizontal panorama, rotate your camera around the Y axis (imaginary line going through your camera into the center of the Earth). If you tilt your camera a bit, it's not a disaster -- PTGui will deal with it -- but why create extra troubles for yourself ? Oh, and obviously, this is where a tripod would come in handy.
5. Download the photos to your computer. Don't color-correct or alter them in any way, yet.

Then, load up PTGui, and go through their wizard. The wizard is pretty self-explanatory, but I'll clarify some of the steps:

1. In the first step, choose "partial, single-row panorama" for a horizontal panorama; choose "multi-row panorama" for a vertical panorama (ok, or a multi-row one, duh).
2. In the "Arrange Images" step, click "Show Panorama Editor", and choose the panorama type by clicking on the of the buttons on the bottom -- rectilinear/cylindrical/spherical. The rectilinear projection usually works best for me, but YMMV. Drag the images on top of each other so that they match up as closely as possible; then, click the "affect entire panorama" button on the bottom (it looks like four blue rectangles), and drag your panorama so that it's centered in the window. Adjust the zoom sliders on the sides so that there's a bit of blank space left around the panorama.
3. The "Control Points" step is where the magic happens; this is where you'll identify identical features in each pair of images, letting PanoTools know how they are supposed to match up. PanoTools will then rotate and move each image precisely into place. For your control points, try to choose features that are as far away from the camera as possible (remember, parallax is not your friend). For obvious reasons, don't pick moving features, such as leaves blowing in the wind, clouds racing across the sky, etc. You'll be sad if you do. Note that, as you click on one of the images, PTGui will actually suggest a matching point on the other image; ideally, it should start hitting the exact spot you need after about 3..4 control points. If PTGui doesn't seem to be learning, you're doing something wrong.
4. PTGui recommends that you set at least 3..5 control points for each pair of images; I recommend that you set at least 10. Anyways, click the next step, "Optimize". This step is actually misnamed; it should be called "Calculate", or "Match Images", or something. This is where PTGui adjusts the images for you so that they match up. You want to get results that say "very good", or, at least, "good". If you're getting any other kind of results, go back and adjust your control points again, or throw out some bad images, or something.
5. Important: Modify your panorama in the next step if you like (do not drag individual images !), and click over to the final step, "Preview and Create Panorama". Click "Preview" if you like, but do not click "Create" yet ! Instead, cancel out of the wizard, go back to the "Panorama Settings" tab, and choose TIFF under "File Format". If you output your panorama as anything other than TIFF, enblend won't work, and you'll be very sad.
6. Finally, click over to the "Create Panorama" tab, and click "Create Panorama". Before you do that, however, make sure that your computer is ready for some pain.

PanoTools and enblend take an enormous amount of computing resources to work. They will take all of your available RAM (if you have 128 Mb or something, you need to upgrade), every single CPU cycle, and, in the final step, up to a gig of free hard drive space (depending on how many images you've stitched together). Your computer might appear to lock up while the panorama is being created. Also, at the very end, you'll see a DOS window pop up, with enblend's output log in it. This is what the -v switch is for; without it, you'd just be staring an empty a black window. Note that if something goes wrong -- i.e., if you run out of RAM or disk space -- PanoTools will just fail silently, and produce a zero-size TIFF file as the output. Bah.

Anyway, when everything is done, you should have a humongous (50..100 Mb or so) TIFF file with the panorama in it. You'll need to open it in Photoshop (or Paint Shop Pro or whatever), crop off the black borders, apply color correction, etc. -- just as you would for a normal photo. Oh, except this photo is about 5x larger than a normal photo, so be prepared for more memory/CPU drain.

I think that's it for the panorama creation process. I am fairly new at this though, so, if you have any tips, let me know.

Belladonna

Posted a couple more miscellaneous photos, mostly of the Amaryllis Belladonna lily that my sister planted in the back yard. Actually, I was taking pictures of the lily over the whole week, and managed to assemble a sort of pseudo-timelapse of it. Very few of the shots turned out, though, but I'll post some if anyone is interested.

Fungal Techno-bloom

Hm, this is certainly something that I hadn't expected to happen. I was sitting quietly in front of my computer, taking a break from working on my next blog entry by reading an article on quantum teleportation in EETimes, when I heard this loud BANG come from the outside. If I lived in Berkeley, I'd double check my front door and call the cops -- but this is Simi Valley, so I took a peek out of the door, instead.

What I saw was a crop of glowing, mushroom-like lanterns, which have apparently sprouted right through my front lawn. At 2:00 am at night. Each lantern is a self-contained unit, consisting of an LED (inside a reflector), a battery, and solar panels on top; the lanterns grow out of the ground on a short PVC stalk. The overall effect was quite eerie; it felt like a combination of Morrowind's Luminous Russula and some hardcore nanotechnology. An evil frog and a glowing bunny watched me from the middle of the patch of electric fungi.

Lately, I have been falling more and more behind the times -- but I've never felt completely obsolete until now. I'd imagine that a tech-savvy, boingboing-reading, flash-mob-starting youth would say, "Cool ! Finally, the lanterns have sprouted on my lawn ! I'd better notify Roland Piquepaille !". I, however, just end up feeling confused and a bit frightened.

What the hell is going on ? Aliens ? Quantum teleportation ? Flash mob ? Nanotechnological self-replication ? Is someone trying to spam me with physical objects ? Is someone trying to frame me for grand theft lantern ? And if so, why ?

Moments like this really make me pause and consider the science fiction novel that we all live in. We have instantaneous global communication, intelligent search engines, cheap mass-produced watches that can work ten years without any maintenance, pictures from the surface of other worlds, commercial space flight, corporate arcologies, and now -- fungal self-contained lanterns on your lawn. When the giant mecha shows up at my doorstep, I won't be surprised.

Swamp Flowers

Last weekend (on Independence Day), I went with my parents on a three-day trip to Yosemite; I haven't been there in a while, so that was quite fun. We actually ended up spending most of our time in the Shaver Lake / Huntington Lake areas; we didn't get to Yosemite-proper until Monday. The Shaver Lake administration was launching fireworks on July 3rd (to beat the July 4th rush, probably). This was not a good time for my (actually, my father's) Soviet-made silumin tripod to break, but, my life being what it is, that's what happened (here's a tip: don't ever use an ultra-brittle alloy for load-bearing spring-like parts). The fireworks weren't actually all that spectacular, though -- the lakes themselves were a lot more interesting.

Apparently, it's currently flowering season in Yosemite. Every little patch of ground with water near it was covered with a carpet of flowers -- mostly lupines, various white puffy things, and these really elegant-looking swamp flowers that I don't know the name for. Unfortunately, it turns out that "patch of ground with water near it" translates into "shallow marsh or swamp", and "flowering season" translates into "mosquito season". It was quite amazing, really -- I'd crouch down in front of some interesting flower, adjust my exposure, half-press the shutter release, and three mosquitos would bite me in the eyelid. The fact that I got sunburned the day before (while swimming in the river) didn't help; my crispy skin must have looked like a giant glowing neon "Good Eats" sign to the mosquitos' heat sensors.

That, and the fact that I wasn't feeling well and was literally falling asleep on my feet, ruined a lot of potentially good shots. It also didn't help that I decided to forego the exposure bracketing mode, thinking that I'd be smart enough to figure it out on my own -- in the interests of saving disk space. As the result, I ended up taking five (instead of the usual three) shots of every subject, four of which were nearly identical and useless. Which is a shame, because Yosemite was really quite beautiful; I haven't seen anything that bright and colorful in a long time. My only regret (besides the crappy photography) is that, despite the weather forecast and the ominous clouds, we didn't get to see a thunderstorm -- we only heard it, from far away.

SpaceShipOne

So, as both of my loyal blog readers probably already know, I took a trip to the Mojave Airport this Monday, to watch the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first privately launched manned spaceship (well, sort of) and the prime contender for the X-Prize. I was planning on taking some nice photos, but a combination of severe sleep deprivation, poor planning, and a faulty lens, made this basically impossible. Which, of course, just means that I got to see the launch, but my loyal blog readers will have to contend themselves with highly superior official photos. Ha ! Er... yeah. Anyway, the meager photos I did manage to take are here; they are arranged in a roughly chronological order.

I headed out to Mojave around midnight, with my sister Sveta and the evil dictator Mike in tow. The Mojave Airport page recommended arriving around 03:00 for the 06:30 launch; I checked Yahoo's directions, doubled the projected travel time (1.5 hours) as usual, and set the departure time at 00:00. As it turns out, this was mistake #1; the roads to Mojave were completely free of traffic, and we got there in exactly 1.5 hours.

After the nice parking lady gave us our parking slip (woo-hoo), we got out of the car and thought of what to do. The immediate answer was: "take cover". At night, the wind in Mojave reached gale-force speeds (well, or it certainly felt like it). The constant torrent of air, which is strong enough to rock the car back-and-forth, carried clouds of sand with it -- and I could literally feel my bare skin abrading away. It was like standing in a Sandstorm. The only safe refuge was inside the car... the warm, quiet, safe car with reclining cushions... zzzz. That was mistake #2; by the time we woke up (though I kept drifting in and out of consciousness), all the best viewing spots were taken.

In any case, after barely waking up in time, we took our second-rate spots next to some creepy guy (who, nonetheless, had the signatures of everyone at Scaled Composites on his cowboy hat) and his "Space Dog" (don't ask). Since we still had about half an hour, we were treated to a pre-flight speech by Scaled, accompanied by hideous, blaring 70s disco music. One would think that a space launch would merit Trance, or Classical, but no. Disco it was. How odd. Anyway, Scaled's speech had cameos from some interesting people -- guests from XCOR, Burt Rutan (the designer of the plane) himself, the Guinness Book of Records people (they seemed a bit less than thrilled to be there, since, as they pointed out, "first" is an awfully hard record to break). There was also some Quimby-esque politician who basically said, "I like space, vote for me".

Scaled also explained the launch procedure: the White Knight mothership with SpaceShipOne attached would take off like a conventional airplane, followed by three chaser planes; after achieving maximum altitude, the White Knight would drop SpaceShipOne, which would then use its rocket engine to boost into sub-orbital space (100km above the Earth). SpaceShipOne would then fold its wings into feather configuration (sort of like the Mmrnmhrm) for re-entry, slow down, transform back, and then land like a conventional glider.

Despite some alarmist rumors (which were quickly squashed by Scaled), the takeoff happened right on schedule; the first plane to take off was the conventional chaser plane, followed by the StarShip (which has nothing to with space travel -- go figure), and the White Knight with SpaceShipOne strapped underneath. The planes got into a formation and circled ponderously overhead -- and then the high-altitude AlphaJet launched, and covered the distance in about 5 milliseconds. That thing looked positively menacing; Scaled's comment about the gatling gun which was mounted on an earlier model made perfect sense.

Unfortunately, at this point I began passing out from exhaustion; still, watching the planes circle overhead was pretty fun. Well, I'm sure a regular air show is a lot more picturesque -- but I've never actually been to an air show, so I don't care. All of Scaled's planes (well, except that crop-duster) look slightly unreal, like some sort of embodied special effects. I mean, the StarShip looks like a paper airplane with canards, how sw33t is that ? The AlphaJet looks like a tiny, menacing, ultra-fast death-dart (withn a gatling gun), and the White Knight itself is just plain weird. I wish I had a better telephoto lens (or the same lens that wasn't broken), so that I could take more detailed shots... but I didn't. Oh well.

Anyways, after several loops above the airport, SpaceShipOne detached from the White Knight and boosted into sub-orbital space (right across the sun... I should've borrowed Mike's shades). The launch did not go off perfectly, by any means -- we heard Scaled say, "Oops, we lost something", and, as I found out later, they weren't kidding. Later on they also said something in pilot-jargon that sounded like "everyone who's tuned in by radio, get off of our emergency frequency NOW". Still, despite the severe mechanical failures, the pilot Mike Melvill was able to reach sub-orbital space, and glide safely down to landing, flying in formation with the chaser planes, and followed by the White Knight (the conventional planes landed after the spacecraft, since they have propulsion and the SpaceShipOne just glides).

It felt odd watching the SpaceShipOne as it was towed past the public viewing area (which was pretty Slashdotted, in a physical way). That thing is hardly bigger than a car, and it basically looks like a toy (my friend Mike said it looked like a bottle rocket), especially with those polka-dot windows and the painted-on stars. It was towed by a truck (well, or SUV, or whatever you call it) down a regular runway in some podunk airport, past a crowd of nerds with cameras (it seemed that everyone had one, even babies), with minimal security, as the 61-year old pilot waved to the cheering crowd from the top of the plane. There were no massive landing gantries, no countdowns, no liquid hydrogen tanks (the plane runs on "laughing gas and rubber", as Scaled Composites puts it). And yet, this was no joke: the plane has actually reached space, and I was there (well, on the ground, that is) when it did it. The whole situation felt like living in a science fiction story.

In fact, there is a particular novel I could think of -- Michael Flynn's Firestar -- that bears more than a passing resemblance to the actual events. Scaled mentioned that the biggest obstacle to their whole operation was not the technology, or the training, or the funding (getting sponsored to the tune of $30e6 by Paul G. Allen certainly helps, though Microsoft is no VHI). No, the most challenging obstacle was in fact government regulation, and figuring out ways around it; in fact, many of the hurdles Scaled mentioned (such as getting permission to fly through any airspace at all) were also listed in the book, word for word. Scaled also mentioned how the plane was built from off-the-shelf parts, and they insisted that their true goal is not just the X-Prize, but profit -- initially, through space tourism... Score another one for Firestar. And they didn't even need to buy Brazil ! I am beginning to think that someone at Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan ?) picked up the book, read it, and then said, "cool, let's do that". Uncanny.

I certainly hope that the rest of Firestar's predictions -- SSTO vehicles and the explosion of private spaceflight -- come true as well (though, as Scaled pointed out, actually getting to orbit is 25 times harder). Scaled Composites is by no means alone in their race for the X-Prize (though they're far ahead of everyone else) -- there's Carmack's software-driven ship, there's XCOR, and there are even the ballon people (though, as Mike said, "at that point you might as well build a space needle"). So, there seems to be a market for private space travel, and there's competition -- even though many competitors, such as the vaguely Plank-like RotorRocket, have shriveled off due to lack of funding (not everyone can be funded by Microsoft, I guess). As Scaled has pointed out in their speech, our government has virtually given up on space industry, since any level of risk, no matter how minute, is unacceptable to them. It's up to the private sector to pick up where NASA left off -- unless, of course, they get crushed by bureaucracy and assorted politicians, like the fictional VHI nearly was. After the launch, I saw someone holding a poster saying "SpaceShipOne, government 0"; and I hope that, despite their technical troubles, Scaled Composites and their competitors can keep scoring points. We are already living in a William Gibson science fiction novel (as Bruce Sterling has pointed out) -- might as well go all the way, and move on to C. J. Cherryh or Arthur C. Clarke, while we're at it. This is the 21st century, after all.

Snowball II

Our family pet T'en' the cat ran away (through the open garage door) and never came back. Refusing to accept life's lessons, my parents obtained another kitten -- some random person was giving kittens away for free, and they seized the opportunity. We named the new kitten "Shopot", which means "Whisper" in Russian. In retrospect, a better name would have been "Topot" (meaning "stomping noise"), since that's the very un-catlike noise he makes when he's galloping around. Unfortunately, Shopot's fur is made of some sort of phototropic nanoscale material which seems to absorb all light (including light from the flash), which makes him very hard to photograph. Which is a shame, too, since he has these really neat circular patterns on his flanks, which I've never seen on a cat (or any other kind of animal) before.

For comparison, I have also uploaded a picture of Pete, my friend Mike's adult cat. Pete weighs as much as an adult human (well, it certainly feels like it), but he can ninja-jump straight up into the air all the way onto the top of the fridge. Maybe he can give Shopot some pouncing pointers, especially since Shopot likes to pounce on my bare feet and devour them.

Darkness and Spiders

Why is it that the weather is so cold and dark ? In May ? In California ? Well, on the plus side, the weather mirrors the state of my own mind. Hm, or is that the minus side ? Hard to tell.

Abducted

Last week, my parents abducted me to go to Frazier park. They just stuffed me into the car and took off before I could say anything. The plan they voiced was to go on a 3-hour tour and check out the hills along the I5 to see if the annual flower storm has come, but even I knew that was just a ruse. As the result, I was too tired to see straight, and certainly too tired to photograph anything properly. It's a shame, too, because if I were awake, I could have taken better shots of the utterly alien plants in the swamp that looked sort of like a cross between Tiberium and Amgen's secret research files.

In addition, I am starting to run out of space on my Deru account again... I should go through the image gallery and filter out the crappy pictures (which would be like 50% of it). The other option would be to sign up with someone else. Fuitadnet promises the seemingly-unrealistic 3Gb of storage for the same price as Deru -- does anyone know what the catch is here ?

Plague of Frogs

Whoa, this was kinda fun. Last weekend, I took my Archos Photo Wallet on a trip to the usual Green Bridge campsite. Then, I just shot everything in range, occasionally dumping photos to the Archos... It was madness I tell you ! Madness !

All in all, I took about 2 Gb of photos and a couple long (albeit low-rez) videos -- most of them of the same patch of flowers. I almost managed to exhaust Sony's inexhaustible battery (I had less than 50 mins left), but my own internal batteries ran out first, and I fell asleep.

Naturally, I had to delete half the photos right away, because they were just useless. Out of the rest of them, only ten or so were even worth a second look. Ok, true, I shot in exposure bracketing mode (3 shots for each click), but still, I suck. Which was a shame, because the place was really green -- flowers and leaves everywhere. There were also hundreds of these phototropically camouflaged frogs, most of which, sadly, didn't turn out at all in the photos. Well, it sort of makes sense, seeing as they've evolved for invisibility.

Oh, I should also mention that NeatImage released the latest version (4.0) of their noise-cancelling plugin. They claim that it's faster and more accurate; I'm not sure about the accuracy, but yes, it is 50%-100% faster than 3.1. This is one of these rare cases when an indespensable piece of software actually improves in the latest version.

Oh, and as usual, if you want me to generate some Zazzle Posters from these images, just ask. Of course, I would feel like an Enron CEO if I didn't mention that you can just download the hi-res images yourself and make your own posters, and it might be cheaper, but... First of all, I can save you a lot of hassle, and second of all, do you want to be a commie pirate ? Well, do you ?

Mushrooms !

Ok, this has really nothing to do with me, but the link was too cool to pass up. My parents sent me this link to California Fungi, a guide to California's edible mushrooms. As far as I can tell, all these mushrooms are actually edible and tasty (I can recognize many of them, but not all); unfortunately, this site does not have a guide to inedible mushrooms, which would kind of be more useful. Their mushroom photos are pretty nice (looking at them makes me hungry), though the Slippery Jack photo is just random. I've never seen an actual Slippery Jack mushroom that looks like that. In this one case, my photo is just more accurate.

Hm, actually, the site is not entirely accurate. For example, for the Lactarius deliciosus ("common name: none"; Russian common name is "Ryzhik" or "reddish-orange guy"), they say:

Edible and good if cooked properly. Lactarius deliciosus requires long, slow cooking to eliminate the grainy texture and slightly bitter flavor. It is also good grilled.

Yeah, ok, if you like to slow-cook things for no reason, then go ahead. The easier way to eat this mushroom is to cover it with tons of salt, and leave overnight. Then, you can wash off the salt and just eat it raw; the salting process neutralizes the bitter milky "juice" of the mushroom, and gives it a crispy, delicious taste. It's like mushroom sushi.

The site also lists Leucoagaricus leucothites and some similar-looking mushrooms as edible. Well, yeah, technically that's right. However, there are many mushrooms that look just like it but are deadly poisonous, such as the "Blednaya Poganka" (Russian word meaning "The Pale Poison-mushroom") which will kill you in one hit. The rule of thumb here is: if the mushroom has ridges on the bottom and a ring on its stem, then don't eat it, unless you really know what you're doing.

No Roses

There's this really huge, burgundy-colored rose outside your house, but you can't see it, because Sony has no saturation control. As the result, its red channel gets completely flooded, to the point where you can't see anything other than the big red blob. So stupid. Even these pomegranate flowers lose a lot of detail, no matter how much channel mixing I do in Photoshop. Sony ? Hello ? Saturation control ? Hello ?

Scattered Shots

Update: David Eckholm has released a patch that fixes (hopefully) the bug mentioned below.

Posted a couple more random images, just to see if Jalbum 4.4 still works. It does, sort of -- it no longer seems to read the "User Comment" EXIF property, but I think that's a bug. The photos themselves aren't really all that remarkable (unless you can tell me where these weird alien spots come from).

Unfortunately, I have received some usability reports (from non-computer-savvy family members) that the pagination of the Life section looks weird with the flowing CSS layout (because of the seemingly empty cells at the bottom). I spent about 30 minutes trying to fix this in CSS, until I realized that I was wasting my time. So, for now, I went back to the good old table-based layout. If you have a small monitor, you'll probably have to scroll (and if you have Netscape 4, you might want to just give up). Sorry about that, not much I can do, until someone fixes the CSS standard.

Trust the Dish

The cooling fan in my old external hard disk enclosure finally bit the dust, so I got a new one. However, I am starting to think that maybe getting it from these guys was a mistake. Click the thumbnail to find out why.

Well, it seems to be working so far... Though this enclosure has no fan, and thus it might cause the disk to melt down. We'll see.

Encroachment

There is a silent war being waged in our back yard -- a war between the genetically engineered and monotonous lawn grass that conforms to the ISO standard, and a variety of dandelions, tiny flowers, and other so-called weeds. The lawn grass monoculture is not winning. I suppose a normal person should feel outrage and try to stop the chaos; I welcome it.

Selling Out, part 2

I don't think I'm supposed to disclose the actual numbers, so let me just say this: my Amazon Associates scam is not bringing in nearly as much money as I'd hoped. Clearly, the fault lies with you, my disloyal blog readers: instead of channeling money to my offshore account like good little consumer-drones, you just read my articles and comment on them. Bah ! Bah I say !

Nonetheless, since I can't (yet) subliminally influence the readers, it follows that I must devise some alternative scheme. I thought about this for a while, and decided to take Roger's advice to hawk my own intellectual property.

Roger suggested that I should actually sell my photos. I was initially skeptical -- but then, a random passerby at the WalMart photo center suggested the same thing. And, if you can't trust random strangers, whom can you trust ? Anyway, I personally think that Roger and the WalMart shoppers are tripping. I've been to PhotoSig, and while that site has its fair share of pompous losers and pr0n, it also contains tons of outstanding and breathtaking photographs, the likes of which I will never be able to even remotely approach. This is what separates true professionals from losers like me.

Still, the greed eventually outweighed my sense of decency, so here we go. Being the illogical hippie freak that I am, the first thing I did was generate a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0) for my photos; this action virtually ensures that I'll never make any profit from anything. Next, I looked for a suitable online vendor to hawk my wares. The one I chose in the end was Zazzle. Zazzle allows you to create a poster, T-Shirt or greeting card based on your photo -- using a very nice and sane Web-based UI which is almost as good as WalMart's. They will then sell your product on their site, paying you a generous 10% cut of each sale. Normally, these terms would suck, but the devil's in the details: Zazzle's license is non-exclusive. This means that I can sell my photos on Zazzle as well as anywhere else that I desire, and Zazzle wouldn't care.

So, here we go: my very own little product catalog. If this works out, I'll add more stuff.

Of course, now I'm faced with a decision: what should I do to my existing photo gallery ? Roger thinks that I should immediately take down the super-high-res versions of my photos -- because, otherwise, there's nothing that stops anyone from creating their own Zazzle product based on them, with just two or three mouse clicks. However, I am kind of reluctant to take the photos down... My friends and family members occasionally look at them, and I'd feel like a jerk if I had to tell them, "sorry, you now have to pay for that wallpaper of yours. Sucker !". I could of course disfigure the photos with some sort of a digital watermark, but I've never put much faith into DRM, so I don't think it's worth the effort.

So, right now, I'm not sure... Am I just wasting my time with this sellout crap ? Or should I go commercial all the way (DRM galore) ? Time will tell, I guess...

Frog

Here we go, some more random photos from around my house. None of them are all that remarkable, except maybe for the frog. Ph33r the frog.

Green Depth of Field

I went with my father on a 2-3 hour walk through Sage Park, and here are the results (all but two of them in the Life section). Unfortunately, almost all of the shots have the aforementioned dynamic range problem... Even more unfortunately, I can't seem to pick the right Depth of Field. If I set it too low, I get some or all of the objects out of focus; if I set it too high, I get the annoying background in focus as well. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with DoF correctly ?

Fileshaker 0.5

Standalone Mode
Skin ModeI updated FileShaker to integrate with JAlbum 4.2. Now, you can use FileShaker as a custom control on the custom UI pane for your skin (it still works as a standalone Java application, too). Unfortunately, in order to do this I had to downgrade FileShaker to the obsolete JRE 1.3.1, since that's what JAlbum comes with by default. The latest JRE can still run it though (at least, on Windows), so it should be ok. While I was at it, I also added a folder tree to the left pane; it's a bit slow right now, though.

As part of the upgrade/downgrade, I used David David Ekholm's RiverLayout and JDirectoryChooser classes, with his permission. Thus, if you modify and release any of the JAlbum code, you should give David credit (as well as yours truly, of course, heh). The RiverLayout class is actually a pretty useful layout manager, and JDirectoryChooser class is a workaround for JRE 1.3.1 bugs, in case you're wondering.

If you want to use FileShaker as a custom control for your skin, here's what you have to do (copy/pasted from the README file):

You can use FileShaker as a custom control for your custom skin UI. To do so, you will need to do two things. First, you will need to copy FileShaker.jar in the "lib" directory of your JRE.

• If you installed a separate JRE just for JAlbum, your "lib" directory should be something like "C:\Program Files\JAlbum\jre\lib"
• If you used a pre-existing JRE instead, your "lib" directory should be something like "C:\Program Files\Java\j2re1.4.2_03\lib\ext"
• If you didn't understand what I just said, I'm sorry, but you can't use FileShaker as a custom UI control -- at least, not until JAlbum is updated to allow custom plugins.

After copying FileShaker.jar to the right place, you'll need to add the following lines to your onload.bsh:

import java.io.File;
import se.datadosen.component.*;
import org.fileshaker.ui.FileShaker;

ui.add("br hfill vfill", new FileShaker(new File(engine.getDirectory())));

Now, you should see the FileShaker window when you click on your custom UI tab in JAlbum. You may have to resize the main JAlbum window to get the entire FileShaker control to fit.

Note that, as usual, FileShaker 0.5 is a pre-alpha, ultra-buggy version which is virtually guaranteed to set your head on fire. That being said, if you actually find any non-combustion-related-bugs, please let me know. Meanwhile, I'll work on getting the folder tree and the image thumbnails to load a bit faster.

As usual, you can download FileShaker here, and the source code (including the README file) here.

Frazier Park photos

Posted a couple more photos from my backyard, and a bunch of photos from my brief visit to Frazier Park. As the result, my camera now contains water as well as sand. In addition, being the idiot that I am, I accidentally set the quality to "Standard" (that's a synonym for "Low"), so all the Frazier Park pictures consist of mostly color banding and JPEG artifacts. Incidentally, here's a consumer tip: Sony's color response really sucks. Another, related tip: don't edit a bunch of bright photos (such as, say, photos of snow) at a stretch: your eye receptors become saturated, and you end up making wrong color correction choices. Bah.

I also updated the Mindhive skin to work with JAlbum's custom skin UI. I've also been working on FileShaker; so, if you're busy reverse-engineering it or something, you might want to wait for the next version. Which will be out Real Soon Now ^TM.

More backyard flowers

The other day Roger disbelieved that I actually took all those photos of the flora in my backyard. So, I took some more. Ha ! That shows him ! Well, actually, from the logical standpoint this makes no sense, because if I downlinked the previous photos from the alien mothership by hacking it with my MacOS 9, I could have downloaded these new ones from the same source. Bah.

Backyard flowers

Posted some more photos of random flora in our back yard. I also paginated the Life section of the site, to cut down on load times... Hopefully that didn't break the fragile CSS. By the way, I haven't even noticed the scary creepy thingies on the dandelion (lower-left quadrant of the flower) until post-production. Some macro photographer I am.

I can't help myself

I know I shouldn't post any more photos of the street outside my house, but I just can't stop. Every time I look outside, the sky is a different color. Of course, Sony's color reproduction sucks (especially compared to ye olde Kodak... go figure), so none of the colors actually make it through the CCD-blender.

ClamperPod mini-review

On a whim, I decided to follow Slater's recommendation and purchase the ClamperPod, a mini-tripod that has a clamp instead of legs. There are some other similar tools available online, but I chose this one because it was uber-cheap (relatively speaking), and because their product page showed my very own Sony DSC-F717 attached to the ClamperPod. Since the actual pod only has a regular swivel head, I also bought the Mini Ball-Head from the same company. I then gave the little thingys a bit of a workout. Conclusion: a good tool with a fatal flaw. Not as good as ancient Russian technology.

The other reason I bought this device is because I've used my father's clamp-pod thingy on a couple of occasions. This thing was made in Russia, but, surprisingly enough, it doesn't suck. The Soviet version comes with a ball-head built-in, and it also has this vicious spike mount that can hammered straight into a tree, if you can't find an appropriate branch to clamp on to. Anyway, this tool is quite useful: it's not as big and unwieldy as a full-scale tripod (fits in your pocket), it's not as random as a monopod, and it can be used to steady your camera in pretty much any setting.

Anyway, that was then, this is now. The worksmanship of the ClamperPod tool is actually pretty solid. It feels light but strong, and the swivel head has these metal ridges (not sure what they're called in English... it's "nasechka" in Russian) which prevent it from slipping and rotating when it shouldn't. Unfortunately, the camera mount and its screw only has a thin "neoprene" (i.e., basically rubber) gasket (as shown on the diagram). This gasket makes it completely incompatible with the Mini Ball-Head (tm). See, when one is trying to take shots of the night sky, it's quite natural to point the camera upwards. In order to do that, one must rotate the camera/ClamperPod/Ball-Head assembly in such a fashion that the camera exerts most of its torque on the little screw with the gasket on it. As the result, the camera keeps slipping, and long exposures (~20 sec) produce nothing but useless streaks... thus defeating the purpose of the tripod.

Fortunately, this problem is not too difficult to fix. What you can do is slip a piece of sandpaper between the Ball-Head and the ClamperPod, folded in two and then glued together (so that there's sandpaper on both sides) -- again, as shown on the diagram. Unfortunately, this doesn't result in a complete fix -- there's still some nasty slippage, as can be seen in my Orion shot. However, this is much better than the hideous gigantic streaks that I was getting before.

Conclusion: I don't think anyone should shell out $12.95 x 2 == $25.90 (not including shipping !) for a tool that they will then have to manually fix, despite this tool being very useful in theory. ClamperPod engineers, if you're listening: make a version of your pod with a built-in ball head. If the Soviets can do it, so can you. Inicidentally, all the photos of ClamperPod in action on their site show the camera resting perfectly vertically on the pod, so that there's no torque. Hmm... I wonder why that's so.

_{Oh, BTW, I also uploaded this orchid photo, but it has nothing to do with tripods, so I didn't mention it in the main post.}

Ripples and Rainbows

Posted a couple more photos. Unfortunately, virtually none of my photos of the rainbowy ripples turned out: it's really hard to focus on the river bottom when everything is moving. Interestingly enough, Sony has no trouble auto-focusing on the surface of the water -- how does it do it ? The military-grade laser was turned off...

Ladybugs and such

Uploaded some more photos; the scary ones are the photos of the churning ladybugs. These things were totally insane; I have more photos of them sitting on my drive if anyone's interested. In other news, it turns out that my common sense was correct: the quicksilvery water-bugs (called Whirlgig Beetles) use their legs to paddle like everyone else, not some weird chemical tricks. However, they move their oar-feet so fast (60Hz) that the legs become virtually invisible.

Jalbum 4.2

Posted a couple more sunrise photos, mostly just to see if the new JAlbum still works. It does. The one neat feature it has is custom skin UI: you can now write a custom init file which can generate arbitrary Java controls and add them to a custom pane in the JAlbum dialog. This means that, theoretically, I can do all kinds of crazy things -- such as integrating FileShaker with JAlbum. Stay tuned.

Technology Good, Humans Bad

Speaking of photos: I was looking for a New Year's present for my grandmother, who is actually very good at creating paintings based on photos, and thus I decided to check out WalMart's Photo Center. My goal was to print out some of my favorite photos on glossy paper, then put it in a little album, and then gift-wrap the whole thing -- and I heard that WalMart has some sort of a service that can do this. I wasn't actually expecting much from a physical store, but WalMart has pleasantly surprised me: their technology is truly superior.

Basically, the Photo Center in the store has this sweet little machine that can print out photos. It's a custom-built Win2k system, sealed up in a neat yellow cabinet. The desktop has an insane number of peripherals plugged into it; here's a (possibly incomplete) list:

• Touchscreen display (much easier to use than a mouse)
• CD-ROM/DvD-ROM drive, which may also double as a burner
• A memory card reader for every kind of memory card known to man, even Sony Memory Stick (though not Memory Stick Pro)
• High-quality scanner
• 8x10 sheet photo printer
• 4x6 sheet photo printer
• Kitchen Sink

Ok, I'm not positive about that last one, but I didn't check behind the cabinet, so who knows. This mega-desktop can basically do two things:

1. Scan your paper-based photos, then enlarge them, print them in high quality, and burn them to CD
2. Read your digital photos, then print them in high quality

Naturally, I went for the second option. I brought in a CD full of JPEG files (all sitting flat in the root directory, no subfolders -- I didn't want to tempt fate), stuck it in, and followed the instructions (BTW, the box actually talks to you !) right to the "load my photos" button. The photos loaded on the second try (more on this in a minute), and showed up on screen almost immediately.

Ok, now I'm going to say something that you might actually find very strange: WalMart's software is simply top-notch. Strange, yes -- but true. I think it's some kind of a custom Shockwave-built UI, made by people who got fired from Apple because they believed in usability, not jellies. The photos are lined up in two clear rows, with three huge buttons: "Previous Page", "Next Page", and "Done". All the buttons are where you'd expect them to be, and they look nice and clean -- these aren't the crappy Windows standard controls or the uber-complicated alpha-shaded rotozooming jellies that Apple is favoring of late. You can touch a checkmark above each photo to select or de-select it for printing, or you can touch the photo itself to go into crop/zoom/color correction options.

The print options for the single photo are also very clean an intuitive. With one or two touches, you can choose the desired size ($0.49 for a 4x6 print, $5 for an 8x10 sheet), correct the colors (I didn't really give this feature a full workout), or move/resize the red box that very clearly shows which part of the photo will be cropped off. Actually, there's a minor annoyance here: the software seems to be hell-bent on filling the entire sheet of paper with your photo -- meaning that there's no way to fit photos with mismatched aspect ratio without cropping -- but this might actually be a misfeature of the printer, not the software. Another annoyance is the hard limit of 25 photos per printing session; but really, this limit makes sense -- by the time I was done printing my photos, the people lined up behind me were muttering darkly and fingering their pitchforks. Thus, I suggest selecting and resizing your photos at home, and then burning them to a CD so that you can print them in one hit. There's no need to rotate the photos; the software is smart enough to figure out portrait/landscape automatically (this seems like a no-brainer, but even Photoshop doesn't do this for some reason).

Anyways, as I was saying, the software is extremely clean and intuitive. It does one thing -- print photos -- and it does it very well. Actually, as my photos were printing, I looked over the shoulder over the next customers; they were using the scanner, and the scanner aspect of this software was also extemely clean and fast.

The quality of the printed photos was also surpsisingly high: my 4x6 prints came out looking glossy and shiny, with very good resolution. Color reproduction was also reasonably good: not perfect (the printer seemed to have particular trouble with the cactus), but quite passable. After the photos are done printing, you just scoop them up, give them to the WalMart lady, pay your fee, and you're done.

Unfortunately, the WalMart machine does have two major weaknesses:

• Filthy human customers stick all kind of crap into the CD drive
• The software locks up if it can't read your CD

I got hit by this combo on my first attempt to read the CD. I pulled it out, cleaned off the gunk, and (after a few unsuccessfull attempts to revive the machine) asked the WalMart lady for help. The following conversation ensued (it's scary how little I am exaggerating):

Stas: Ah, excuse me, can I get some help ?
WalMart Zombie Drone: Duuuuhhh... Uh ?
Stas: Ah. This photo printing machine seems to have locked up.
WMZD: Derrr... Locked up ?
Stas: Yeah. Is there a reset button you can press ?
WMZD: Are you sure ?
Stas: Yes. Quite sure.
WMZD: *painstakingly shuffles over to the machine* Duuhh... Have you tried... pressing buttons ?
Stas: Yeah. Why don't you show me how it's done.
WMZD: *stabs the touchscreen for a few minutes* Huuuuh... It seems to have locked up.
Stas: Imagine that.
WMZD: Duuuhhh... let me... uh... get... the key... *shuffles over to the counter, rummages there for a while, and shuffles back with the key* Let me... open this...
Stas: (thinking) One one-thousand, two one-thousand, think happy thoughts, 5 whole hours until closing time...
WMZD: *finally opens the lock, which is just a simple rotating piece of metal* Duuhhh... where is it... This button ?
Stas: Sure, why not.
WMZD: *pushes the power button, and the screen goes blank* Duuuhhh... *just stands there* You think... uuuhhh... this is long enough ?
Stas: Yeah, positive.
WMZD: *pushes the power button again, Win2k starts booting* Derrr... Looks like it's... going... ?
Stas: Great. Thanks for the help.
WMZD: *tries to close the cabinet door, but the lock is still in the open position*
Metal Latch: *dink*
WMZD: *tries to close the cabinet door again, but the lock is still in the open position... again*
Metal Latch: *dink*
Stas: Ah, you might want to open the lock first, then close the door, then close the lock.
WMZD: Uhhhh... Duuuhhhh ?
Stas: Just turn the key counterclockwise.
WMZD: Duuuhhhh... Uhhhh ?
Stas: Like this.
Metal Latch: *click* *door closes*
WMZD: Aaaaahhh ! :-) Thank you.
Stas: Don't mention it.
WMZD: *somehow manages to lock the door, and shuffles off*

Look, I am not normally one to judge people. Ok, ok, so I am, but I mostly keep it to myself. But... what the hell ? The WalMart-trained PhotoCenter (tm) professionals can't even figure out a simple door ? Why the hell not ? I would chalk it up to bad luck, except it's like this everywhere. Ask me about the Verizon store sometime -- or, better yet, don't, unless you like to listen to lots of screaming. Not a single physical store that I've visited in the past year -- not even freaking Jonss ! -- not a single one of them had employees who had any idea about what they were actually selling. I'm talking about simple things too, such as "open this door for me", not about complex things, such as "is it possible to print in 8x5". What happened ? Is the human race so far gone that a Shockwave UI running on top of Win2k can outsmart them every time ?

I guess, the lesson here is to do your homework before coming to WalMart, or any other store for that matter. You can rely on yourself, and on yourself alone. Fortunately, the actually intelligent aliens who created the photo printing machines did quite a good job, so you won't be disappointed, unless the zombies get in the way.

I'm so conflicted

So, I was looking for an upgrade to my trusty Sony DSC F717 camera. My reasons for the upgrade are varied. For example, I really need to have a saturation control; I'd also like a better UI/button combination; and I got sand into my 717's manual focus ring, which makes hideous grinding noises now. Until recently, I was looking at Sony's F828 as the logical replacement; however, as of now it seems that Sony's new camera is not the wonder-toy of pixel-pushing power that Sony's marketers claim it is.

I was looking at the F828 primarily because it fixed all the problems I had with the F717, while retaining the excellent form factor and lens system. In addition, the new camera has an RGBY sensor, which promises better color reproduction and more correct auto-white-balance -- a feature which, if true, would fullfill my dreams of never having to look at hideous yellow shots ever again. However, according to the reviews, F828 has two major problems: chromatic aberration (a.k.a. purple fringing) and noise. The chromatic aberration in particular seems to be unacceptable to most people, and the hideous noise at ISO above 100 is the logical effect of Sony's marketing-driven desire to cram 8 Megapixels into a tiny sensor.

However, Sony's camera still contains an insane number of features (the uber-fast Zeiss lens being just one of them). The only camera that seems to meet (or even exceed) these features, for a comparable price, is the Minolta DiMage A1. Unfortunately, after looking at the reviews, I feel like the proverbial donkey that dies of starvation because it's stuck between two equally desirable piles of hay.

In other words, both cameras have their pros and cons, and their weighted average sums up to zero in my mind. This is what matters to me about the Sony camera:

• + Excellent build quality. The camera feels nice and solid, the lens is balanced directly under my left hand, and the camera body swivels so that I can shoot at waist level (or, in fact, any level). I have used this feature on many occasions, it really is a big plus.
• + Nice huge lens, which does not extend when zooming (unlike all the other lenses). This makes it faster (in all senses of the word) and easier to handle.
• + RGBY sensor. Better color reproduction and white balance... Assuming it works.
• + Movie mode. 640x480x30fps. Insane.
• + Sensible UI: hold button, turn mode dial, the camera echoes your choices in real time.
• + Macro focus of 2cm. That's right, you heard me: TWO CENTIMETERS. That's just Power Overwhelming.
• + Railgun-mounted flash and military-grade hologram-assist laser. It's more than a camera; it's a small aresnal. The low-light focus is also very good.
• + I already have all these batteries, memory sticks, and filters for it.
• - Encrypted RAW files. What the hell ? Is Sony deliberately trying to piss people off ? I don't take this crap from the RIAA, and I'm not going to take it from Sony either.
• - The CompactFlash is not fully compatible with Sony's camera. See above.
• - Unacceptable CA and noise. NeatImage can only do so much. Inicidentally, the people on DPReview's forums * were very helpful in my research. They kept saying things like, "you can't see the noise on 4x6 prints", or "CA is not a big deal if you look at this photo from 10m away". Yeah, right, and I bet it looks even better if you reduce it to the size of a postage stamp. Guess what ? I deal with digital photos exclusively, I don't care how small your paper prints are.

And here are my thoughts about the A1:

• + More manual controls than even F828. Saturation bracketing, baby ! Not to mention tunable WB, tone, etc. etc.
• + Way, way less noise even at ISO 400
• + A bit less CA as well
• + Selectable manual focus preview: you can magnify any area of the image to check the focus.
• + Anti-shake ! This camera actually moves the CCD to compensate for your hands shaking. And by now, I've lost so many great shots due to shaky hands that I've lost count.
• + Continuous focus: makes the AF faster when shooting things that move.
• - DPReview says that the camera produces some weird Bayer artifacts, which greatly reduce its effective resolution.
• - Crappy macro performance, especially as compared to 717/828. The macro focus distance is 30cm (as opposed to 2cm), and Minolta apparently limits you to some sort of a weird macro preset -- basically, you can't zoom in macro mode. Bah.
• - I've never used this camera, so I'm not sure how it would feel in my hand.
• - Slower shooting times.
• - Less accurate low-light focus.
• - Lower build quality, worse form factor (no more body tilting...)

Most of the other features of the two cameras -- resolution, battery life, hotshoe, etc. -- are either unimportant to me, or are nearly identical.

I have also considered some DSLRs, such as the EOS Rebel that Roger has, but I have decided that DSLRs are really not for me. The only advantage of the viewfinder that I can think of would be the manual focus. In all other ways, the LCD/EVF is superior: it shows me exactly what my photo would look like -- white balance, exposure, noise, etc. -- not just what the lens sees. And besides, it's physically impossible to use the viewfinder with glasses (the lenses get in the way). Bah. The other good feature of DSLRs -- replaceable lenses -- is simply too expensive for me to afford.

So... finally... I once again come to you, my loyal blog readers (yes, both of you). What should I do ? Specifically, does anyone here have any experience with Minolta's cameras ? If you were going to spend ~$1k on a digital camera, which one would you get ?

_{* Inicidentally, I tried posting this exact comment on DPReview's forums. They asked for my email address for purposes of registration, and then never emailed me my password. What's the deal ? Am I not 1337 enough to post on public forums anymore ?}

Flowers and Beetles

Posted some new photos, mostly in the Life gallery, but some in Earth and others as well. In other news, the Japan trip photos are still sitting around on my drive doing nothing. I tried organizing them in MovableType, but it simply wasn't designed to handle that kind of a job... I need a real CMS to do this. But, meanwhile, I think I'll just write another custom JAlbum skin.

ACDSee 6 sucks, Film at 12

If you deal with digital photography in any way, you probably use ACDSee. For me, this program is an integral part of my photographic workflow: it lets me download, batch-rename and batch-rotate images, and it has extensive support for JPEG metadata, which is quite useful for adding image descriptions so that JAlbum can spit them onto the web site (it also supports every other image format on the face of the planet). It also has the fastest JPEG viewer on the face of the planet, a file browser with column auto-width, and sane confirmation dialogs with preview. Oops, did I say has ? I meant, had, past tense. Their new version is basically useless.

ACDSee 6.0 is about 10x slower than 5.0, which makes working with more than three images virtually impossible. It eliminated all the really useful keyboard shortcuts for no reason whatsoever, and it changed the batch-rename and batch-rotate dialogs (which is what I use most often) to some kind of ugly, incomprehensible mess. What is the tradeoff, you might ask ? The tradeoff is that they turned their menu bars into some kind of custom graphics thingy that doesn't even look like a menu anymore; they also added a strange multiple-selection window which would be cool if it wasn't prohibitively slow. Column auto-width is also permanently crippled: you now have to manually fiddle around with each column for each directory. To add insult to injury, the details view does not update correctly when you edit the images.

The one useful thing they did was to change the JPEG metadata popup window into a slide-out pane which is much easier to use... but... it's simply not worth the aggravation. ACDSee 5.0 is an indispensible tool for anyone; ACDSee 6.0 is a piece of crap. I might be willing to give ACDSystems the benefit of the doubt if they didn't force people to pay full price for upgrades, but, seeing as that's exactly what they do, they can rot in binary hell as far as I'm concerned.

Parents Galore

My parents, a very photogenic pair, indicated that they won't mind if I post some of their photos online, so here we go. Naturally, most of the photos are in the Spirit gallery. Unfortunately, most of these photos are quite old -- shot with the Kodak camera -- and thus the quality is a bit blah. Also unfortunately, most humans in my photographs tend to have their eyes closed due to the flash... I don't know what to do about that.

MSIE sucks, film at 11

I was messing around with my JAlbum skins, when I discovered this unpleasant tidbit. Microsoft Internet Explorer has this weird misfeature which applies to images: when you click on a JPEG, then, for some reason, MSIE will shrink down the image to fit the page. Naturally, this is the opposite of what you want when viewing full-sized photos. To bypass this behavior, go to MSIE's menu bar, and select Tools | Internet Options | Advanced, then turn off "Enable automatic image resizing" under "Multimedia". Also naturally, this won't be a problem for you if you're using a real browser such as Mozilla or Opera. Weird.

Waiting for the upload

Posted a few more random photos; there are some zoomed-in photos in the respective galleries. I will post the photos from distant shores as soon as they finish uploading. Which should be any day now. Aaaaaany day now... Where's real DSL when you need it ?

Lunar Rainbow

Posted some more random pictures, most of them in the Air gallery. I saw this really neat, circular rainbow which was cast by the Moon -- this is probably a widely-known phenomenon, but I have never seen it until now, and thus I was impressed. Too bad my night photography skills are next to nonexistent.

Inicidentally, here is a consumer tip: if you buy a tripod, make sure that it has:

1. A completely metallic head, and
2. Extensible legs that latch.

My toy mini-tripod is made of plastic and relies solely on friction to maintain the legs; thus, the best use for it is as a doorstop. The F717 camera just makes it fold and collapse like a wet noodle.

Mostly Beach Photos

Here are some random photos again; most of them feature the beach, but there are a few miscellaneous ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like I got sand into my brand-new Sony F717 camera, so now I'm screwed.

Simi Valley Fire

As you may have heard, the entire Simi Valley has been on fire these past two days, along with the rest of Southern California. Fortunately, the fire seems to have missed my house so far; still, it looked pretty scary for a while. Seeing the flames race down the hill, and watching the ashes falling from the sky -- I felt as though I was in Pompeii during the eruption. Currently, the fires seem to have subsided a little, but the air is still full of smoke, ash, and emergency helicopters.

Update: According to the talking heads on KFI, all the fires were started on purpose by people who are "underachieving, socially inept geeky loners". Well gee. I'm glad we sorted that one out. Bloggers everywhere, pack up your MovableTypes...

Moths and stuff

Added a couple more random images. I really should shell out for that 10x lens, despite the fact that it has an even crappier DOF...

Yellow yellow everywhere

Uploaded a couple more random photos. Inicidentally, the color artifacts on F717 are really, really bad in low light; basically, everything appears ultra-yellow... It's correctable in Photoshop, but annoying as hell. Kodak has that problem too, but it's a) red and b) not as pronounced. I tried using the insta-white-balance option on the Sony, but it did nothing. Does anyone else have problems like this ? Or am I just doing something wrong ?

Low Light Noise

Uploaded about four and a half more images to the Air and Machine galleries. I did not really appreciate how good Sony's noise reduction is until yesterday: compared to Kodak, it's godlike. I hardly even had to use NeatImage on my nighttime shots.

Next upgrade: liquid cooling

I finally broke down and got .Hack//Infection for PS2 -- let's hope it's at least marginally better than the abysmal anime .Hack//Sign. Maybe it's at least as good as Liminality... One can only hope... Anyway, to commemorate the occasion, I took some photos of my computer setup. The router and DSL modem are in the next room; the Linux box (not shown) is in the back.

 

FileShaker 0.4

By popular demand (ok the demand of just one person), I have updated FileShaker with some custom configuration capabilities. Briefly, here is what I changed:

• FileShaker now stores its configuration in a file named "fileshaker.properties", in the same directory as the jar file. You can change the default names for "albumfiles.txt" and "comments.properties" there.
• Renamed the custom comments file to "comments.properties", to keep with the de facto standard naming scheme of JAlbum.
• Added an autosave checkbox and a save button. If autosave is off, you'll have to manually click the save button every time you change to a different folder.

More information is available in the README file.

As usual, you can download the source code here, and the JAR file here.

Sony Telephoto Lens mini-review

Oops, I meant to post this along with my previous entry, but I forgot. But really, I don't have much to say about the telephoto lens. It's useless. The 2x magnification is miniscule compared to Kodak's 6x lens (and compared to Sony's internal 5x zoom), and the horrible distortion all around the frame is simply not worth it. The lens may be all shiny and housed within an aluminum casing, but the bottom line is, it just doesn't work.

Low Dynamic Range

Added a couple more images to the gallery (including the ones shown above). In the process of taking the photos, I learned a few more things about F717 (listed below):

• The LCD monitor is definitely not as good as the LCDs made by Sony's competitors. All the colors on it look a bit washed out. As the result, I lost quite a few potentially good shots, because I trusted the LCD and turned down the exposure.
• The temptation to shoot low-quality, uber-compressed, 320x240 video is just too strong. I can't resist it. I think I need a camcorder... Then, "I will be able to project myself in. Full range, full motion."
• Partially due to the above point, Sony eats memory sticks as though they were fishsticks. I should have waited for the 828 camera, which will finally support CompactFlash like Turing intended.
• F717 has an excellent mode called "Exposure Bracketing", where the camera takes a 3-round burst shot of the scene, upping the exposure a bit each time. This feature would be even more useful if I actually remembered that I had it.

The most important lesson, however, was this: I still don't know how to photograph objects in direct sunlight. It seems as though I have two options:

1. Turn down the exposure, making everything dark. Detail in dark areas is completely lost.
2. Turn up the exposure, making everything bright. Detail in bright areas is completely lost.

In both cases, the image contrast turns out to be very high -- hence, information is lost, and the results hurt your eyes in general.

Some people on the Internet suggest taking multiple shots of the same scene with varying levels of exposure (by, for example, using the aforementioned Exposure Bracketing mode), and then combining them in Photoshop *. However, this techinque could only work in laboratory conditions. In real life, the scenery is always changing. Even if you eliminate camera motion by using a tripod, the subjects themselves move around -- blades of grass bend in the wind, humans breathe, water flows, clouds crawl across the sky, etc. Thus, the geometry of your photo changes between exposures, and combining the layers in Photoshop becomes painstakingly difficult -- or, frankly, quite impossible. If I could manually outline each blade of grass, I might as well become a real artist, not a photographer.

Someone on the pretentious (and, sometimes, broken) site PhotoSIG recommended that I use something called a "Diffuser" when shooting daytime scenery. However, as far as I can tell, this device is equivalent to [Duplicate Layer] -> [Gaussian Blur] -> [Lower Transparency] in Photoshop. This is a neat effect, but it's not what I want. The fine details in bright or dark areas (depending on which you choose) still get lost.

Another solution that someone mentioned is to use a Filling Flash to illuminate the dark areas better. However, this is problematic for me, mostly because I am not quite sure what a "Filling Flash" is. More importantly, this technique won't work with landscape photography (ironically, landscapes suffer from this problem the most), because the flash is simply not powerful enough to light up a square kilometer of forest.

So, I hereby turn for help to you, my loyal blog readers. Yes, both of you. Have you encountered this problem ? If so, what's the solution ? Note that I am looking for practical and reasonably cheap solutions, as opposed to advice such as "Buy the Fuji HDR camera" or "Put this expensive Bavarian film into your Sony Cybershot F717". I mean... there must be a solution, right ?

_{* Sorry Roger, I can't find that link...}

Fileshaker 0.3

I have modified FileShaker to handle custom comment files (named "albumcomments.txt"), as described in the JAlbum tutorials. This was a lot easier than patching the broken comment reading/writing code. I also fixed a few bugs, and made some cosmetic changes. Note that the custom comments will not show up automatically -- you'll have to modify your skins a bit if you want to use the custom comments, as described in the aforementioned tutorial. I pasted the appropriate script into the README file, which I pasted below for your convenience:

***

FileShaker is a quick and dirty Java application that complements JAlbum (http://www.datadosen.se/jalbum). If you don't know what JAlbum is, then FileShaker will be completely useless to you, so you might as well stop reading now.

Specifically, FileShaker can be used to rearrange album images in a custom order, and to add custom comments to the images.

To start using FileShaker, run it by typing "java -jar FileShaker.jar" (simply doubleclicking FileShaker.jar should work in most Windows systems). The FileShaker window will pop up. At the top of the window, you will see a box which displays the current folder. Click the button to the right of this box in order to set the current folder; you should set it to the root folder of your album.

Below the folder box is a table which lists all the files in the current folder. You can select a file with the mouse, and then use the [^] and [V] buttons on the toolbar to move it up and down in the custom order.

The panel on the left displays the image thumbnail of the currently selected file, and its custom comment. Note that JAlbum will not automatically pick up the custom comments. In order to make them work, you'll have to modify your skin, by adding the following script fragment:

<%
  import se.datadosen.util.*;
  File cFile = new File(imageDirectory, "albumcomments.txt");
  if (cFile.exists()) {
    Map captions = IO.readMapFile(cFile);
    String text = (String)captions.get(fileName);
    if (text != null) out.print(text);
  }
%>

You can read a better explanation of this process on the JAlbum homepage: http://www.datadosen.se/jalbum/scripting.jsp#commentfile .

FileShaker stores the custom file order in a file called "albumfiles.txt"; it stores the comments in a file called "albumcomments.txt". Each folder inside the album will contain these files. If you delete "albumfiles.txt", the custom file ordering will be removed. Similarly, if you delete "albumcomments.txt", the custom comments will be removed.

FileShaker is pre-alpha software, which means that it's buggy, unstable, and generally bad. If you're using it, you're probably risking your life. That being said, there are some more specific problems with FileShaker: there's no undo, no online help, no way to save the configuration, and the program is generally slow as hell. I plan to fix these problems in a future release... eventually.

***

Obviously, this is not really a good solution to, well, anything. The optimal solution would be to add some sort of a custom-file-ordering GUI to JAlbum, and to replace the broken EXIF-writing code with something better (such as jpegrdf, assuming that it works at all).

As usual, you can download the source code here, and the JAR file here.

FileShaker 0.2

Ok, I sorted the project into separate files, and created a jar file for it. You can get the source here, or you can download the jar file and run it with

java -jar FileShaker.jar

Actually, on most Windows systems, double-clicking the jar file should do the trick.

FileShaker 0.1

I got frustrated by the crappy custom file order implementation contained in JAlbum 3.5, and so I wrote a quick-and-dirty Java application which should make custom ordering a bit easier. Note that this program (tentatively called FileShaker) is pre-alpha quality software. If you use it, you're obviously insane, since it will blow up your computer, infest your kitchen with roaches, and order pizza in your name. In other words, I am not responsible for whatever the program does to your files.

Nonetheless, here is how you can check out the application for yourself:

1. Download the source code from http://metabug.dyndns.org/Elemental/FileShakerSource.zip
2. Unzip it into some directory
3. javac FileShakerApp.java
4. java FileShakerApp

If you do not understand the above instructions, then you are probably not familiar with how Java works; thus, you should avoid my broken program like the plague until it improves. Anyways, the program currently doesn't do anything fancy: it just reads and writes your "albumfiles.txt" file in the current directory. You can use the up-down buttons to move the files around, or you can click the "Alpha" and "Tau" buttons to sort alphabetically or by date, respectively.

Here is a list of everything that's wrong with the program (everything that comes to mind, anyway), in no particular order:

• The source code is just one gigantic Java file. This is obviuosly wrong, but I didn't have much time to learn how to set up an Ant project that actually works.
• The program is really, really slow, because I used the "naive" implementation for everything.
• There is no way to reverse the sort order
• There is no help of any sort or documentation
• The sort order is automatically saved when you switch folders. There is no undo.
• The program does not support JAlbum's excellent feature of putting arbitrary files into albumfiles.txt . Only files in the current folder are supported.
• There are no unit tests for anything. Or any tests, for that matter.
• Bugs, bugs, bugs

Sadly, I feel I must have re-implemented about 70% of JAlbum's code in the process of making FileShaker. However, David Ekholm (author of JAlbum) refuses to release his source code for now, which means that I really have no other choice. While I normally scoff at "dirty gnu hippies" (hint: just because information wants to be free, doesn't mean that it should), I belive that this case clearly demonstrates why open source is good -- especially considering that JAlbum development is relatively slow.

Anyway, if someone actually takes the time to try out FileShaker, let me know what interesting and exotic bugs you find in there. I'll post updates on the blog if I manage to fix/improve things.

My Camera Is Bigger Than Yours

I just got a new macro lens for my camera: the B+W NL5 Lens, and I took some test pictures with it. I also updated the Spirit gallery with some old DC4800Z images that I got permission to release.

Note: the scaled-down versions of the cactus photos look extra-crappy for some reason, you may want to click through to the originals.

I am really impressed by the B+W lens (what does that stand for, anyway) ? It's pretty cheap for a lens, and it does suffer from chromatic aberration, just like all lenses of its kind do (apparently). However, it feels really solid, and it really makes a big difference. The generally faster lens of the Sony camera, combined with its greater stability, makes taking macro shots a real pleasure -- which is, of course, spoiled a bit by the sheer size of the camera body.

In the manual, Sony told me to always set the "conversion lens: on" option in the Setup menu when I attach a conversion lens. However, doing so locks the camera into some sort of zombie mode, where it can't even autofocus... so screw that. What F717 doesn't know won't hurt it; the camera can autofocus and autometer (is that a word ?) pretty well with the B+W lens, and the "conversion lens" option set to "off".

I think what I will do next is order the 10-diopter lens from the same company. Combined with the +5 lens, and the 6x optical zoom of the camera, it will make me... Invincible ! Mwa ha ha ha !

Adventures With Sony

The more I play with the Sony camera, the more mixed my impressions of it become.

Lessons Learned:

• Don't use the White Balance button. It's a trick. They just want you to screw up your colors.
• The noise in low-light conditions is comparable to Kodak. I.e., it sucks. Just as with Kodak, though, setting the ISO to 100 fixes the problem somewhat.
• The default video settings are useless. They record nothing but noise. The "HQX" video mode is a bit better, but it still only records 320x240 video... Basically, the movie mode of the camera is just a gimmick.
• The NightFraming mode, on the other hand, is actually useful. Good job, Sony.
• I am still having major problems with macro focusing when I zoom in even a little bit. I don't get it... what do they want from me ? Kodak can focus at any zoom with no problems. Well, I should say, no more problems than usual.

Sony F717 - First Impressions

Ok, I finally got my F717 camera in the mail, charged it up, and shot a few pictures. Unfortunately, I haven't been bale to give the camera a full workout, since it was a bit dark outside when I was finally able to test it out. Still, I thought I might as well post some of my initial impressions of F717, and compare it to my trusty old Kodak DC4800Z.

Here are some random factoids about F717:

• This camera is big. It's huge. Take two Canon Powershot G3s, stick them together in an L-shape, scale the whole thing by a factor of 1.5, and that's still smaller than F717. This is the X-Box of digital cameras.
• Holding the camera feels kind of weird. You are supposed to hold the lens assembly with your left hand, and the camera body with your right. This feels subjectively a lot steadier than holding a regular camera, since you are steadying the lens directly. Unfortunately, the essential thumb-operated controls on the lens barrel can be hard to reach for someone who does not have extra-long thumbs. In addition, holding the camera at eye level forces me to bend my wrist in an unnatural way, which is physically painful. Fortunately, the swiveling camera body compensates for this a bit.
• Sony's UI is inferior to Kodak's. With Kodak, as soon as you press the Menu button, your entire screen is replaced by a full-screen menu, which is easy to read. Sony chose to show a bunch of transulcent, overlaid mini-menus, instead. They may look cool, but they're hard to navigate and read. In addition, Sony doesn't have an "Ok" button; instead, you are supposed to press the 4-directional controller straight down. This is convenient in theory, but impossible to do in practice.
• Most of the features of the camera, are controlled with the jog dial. You click the jog dial to scroll through the options, such as aperture, exposure time, focus bracket location, etc., and you rotate the dial to change the setting. Every other camera on the market (analog or digital) has dedicated dials for exposure, aperture, etc. Clicking through the menus is annoying when all you want is to take a picture. Of course, I should say "almost every other camera"; DC4800Z has a dedicated wheel for aperture but exposure is set in the menu.
• For this reason, shooting in P mode is not as convenient as it is with DC4800Z. The Kodak camera has a dedicated control on top which can adjust the exposure compensation; with the Sony camera, you have to click through menus. Same thing goes for the A mode; the S mode is a lot better than Kodak, since it does not involve going through the main menu.
• Sony chose to include lots of presets for different kinds of shots on their main control wheel -- such as portrait and landscape -- and not one but two auto modes: one where you can adjust the exposure compensation, and one where you can't. These extra modes are useless. All you really need is P, A, S, and M. The other presets just waste valuable control space, which could have been spent instead to adjust burst shooting modes or movie settings.
• On the other hand, Sony's HUD is superb. It shows you all the information that you need to know, including the focusing brackets (that turn green when auto-focus is achieved), the zoom level, and the real-time histogram of the image. The histogram is very useful; I kept wishing I had it all the time when I was using Kodak.
• The monitor itself is also very good. It's bright -- so bright, in fact, that I instinctively dialed down the exposure compensation when I first tried the camera. The viewing angle is not as good as Kodak's, but the swiveling camera body compensates for this as well. All in all, being able to see the monitor in daylight is a big plus.
• The EVF is really good too. It has a nice diopter adjustment, a rubber eye cup, and a high-resolution screen devoid of any external interference. Of course, I still can't really use it because I wear glasses, and thus pressing my eye against the EVF is impossible... But, nonetheless, I'm impressed.
• The color response of the camera in low-light conditions is comparable to Kodak's. I.e., it sucks. Only Kodak leans toward red, whereas Sony leans toward yellow. I guess this is unavoidable unless you use Fuji's new HDR camera.
• Inexplicably, the Sony camera does not have a saturation control. Without a saturation control, I can't adjust the saturation. I wish someone would clue Sony in to that fact. Oh, sure, there is a white balance control, but it's a) too granular, and b) not the same thing.
• dpreview was right about the saturation thing, and about other things as well, such as the uber-aggressive sharpening (which you can turn down, thankfully). They were especially right about the limited storage capacity. 128 Mb is simply not enough to do anything, and Memory Stick Pro is too expensive for an average user such as myself. The Memory Stick has got to be one of the dumbest inventions in the world.
• When I read on the Sony's page that their macro focus went all the way down to 2 cm, I was assuming it was just hype. Not so. It really does go down to 2 cm... amazing. You can stick the camera right there into the scene, and it will focus automatically. However, there's a catch... there always is. For some reason, zooming in even a little bit completely destroys the camera's ability to focus, automatically as well as manually, at any distance. I am not sure why it does that... maybe I'm doing something wrong ?
• Another thing that really worries me about macro performance is the total lack of macro lenses for F717. As far as I can tell, they just don't exist. Kodak, on the other hand, sells a 7x and a 10x macro lens... I guess I was just taking them for granted. This makes me sad, because macro photography is practically all I ever do.
• The non-macro performance of the camera is very good, though. It's much faster than DC4800Z, it focuses better in low light, and the huge lens really makes a difference. The camera is also very quiet, practically noiseless -- once you turn off the annoying beeps in the setup menu. The Kodak camera sounds like a jet taking off in comparison.
• When Sony says "Hologram Laser AF Assist", they aren't kidding. I used the camera for about half an hour, and I have already zapped two humans and a cat with the holographic laser burst. Sony says it's perfectly safe, but it's kinda scary. I am not actually sure if the hologram makes the low-light focus any better, but it sure is neat.
• You can adjust the flash levels on the Sony camera ! W00t ! This is another feature that I kept wishing I had on DC4800Z. As an added bonus, the Sony flash is mounted on some sort of an electromagnetic railgun. There's no reason for this setup, but it's quite cool.

Well, I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. So far, I am not actually sure which camera I prefer. F717 has a few more features and a vastly superior lens, but, in the classic Sony fashion, it's harder to use than it needs to be because of some stupid design goal of simplifying/prettifying everything. I will post another chapter of the review when I've had a chance to give the camera a real workout.

Rainbows

Added a couple more images of rainbows, shot with my trusty old Kodak DC4800Z. However, I just got my shiny new Sony F717 in the mail... Expect a preliminary report soon.

Old Photos

Posted some more photos that I found sitting on my hard drive. I think this is the last of them, though -- so you can expect that it will be a while before I post new photos.

Isabella Lake Photos

Added a couple more images to the gallery, mostly in the Life section. I suck at holding the camera motionless.

Firecrackers

Some obligatory July 4th pictures. Mine are not nearly as good as Roger's, of course.

Plug^3

The one, the only, Slater: author of Black Coffee. His photography is of much higher quality than mine, even though I feel I have a slight edge in macro shots.

New Photos

Uploaded a bunch of new images to the photo album -- mostly in the Life section, but also some in Fire and Spirit. Updated the album scripts to handle sub-album descriptions.

CSS Sucks

Updated the photo gallery with two new images, and converted the index template to CSS. Now, the image thumbnails should wrap around correctly. Of course, CSS being the demonic scourge on mankind that it is, the thumbnail section is no longer centered correctly. If anyone has any ideas about why that happens, I'd like to hear them...

Visual Plug

The time has come once again to plug Roger's blog. But this time, I get to do it... with pictures !

New Photos

New images posted to the JAlbum-generated gallery. Mostly of pretty flowers and filthy humans.

Son of Photo Disappointment

I am still not sure which software would be best for photo publishing. So far, I have settled on two possible solutions: Fotki, an online photo gallery site, and JAlbum, a client-side photo publishing program written in Java which I tested out on my gallery.

As I mentioned before, Fotki has a kickass file uploading interface, and it allows comments as well as some metadata. It also allows me to rearrange the photos in any order I like, and has nifty integration for ordering prints. And it's clearly made by Russian programmers, which is always a good thing. Unfortunately, it costs $30/year, and it does not allow custom styling (from what I can tell).

Unlike Fotki, JAlbum is a client-side app, which means that all the photos are stored locally, and all JAlbum does is create HTML and upload it to the server. This is both good and bad, in a way. Good because all the code is local -- I just need some simple webspace on the server, no PHP or that chmod 777 crap. Bad because all the metadata has to be stored on the filesystem somehow, which means that certain things are excessively annoying to do -- like ordering photos in a custom way, or setting custom labels for each photo. And of course, since the files on the server are just dumb html, I would need to do some extra work to integrate the album with my blog or to provide per-photo comments.

Of course, one advantage to JAlbum is that I can make the resulting HTML pages look the way I want (well, or I theoretically could if I had mad CSS sk33lz). However, I am not sure how much of an advantage this really is.

So, I thus come to you, my loyal blog readers (yes, all three of you). What do you prefer ? Do you prefer the flexibility of Fotki, or the custom look of JAlbum ? Or would you prefer me to shut up already ? I think I can guess what your answer will be, but feel free to post your comments anyway.

Photo Disappointment II

Frustrated (I mean, inspired) by my lack of photo publishing options, I turned the previous comment into a story submission on kuro5hin. And, incredibly enough, it got voted up to section. Whoo ! I feel so proud. Or something. In any case, there are some informative user comments that list alternatives to Gallery, which I will explore shortly.

Photo Disappointment

Well, after a few days of searching, I have determined one thing: there is no good way to publish your photos on the Web. But there are several sub-optimal ones. I finally settled on Fotki, but this is only a temporary measure.

All I wanted was to upload some of my photos to somewhere where people can view them and comment on them. Sounds simple, right ? Unfortunately, nothing in life is really simple, as I have found out.

My first attempt at this actually took place about a year ago, when I opened an account on photo.net. Unfortunately, on top of their other problems (such as being built by a loser on obscure and obsolete software), photo.net has this to say about Photoshop:

As of Photoshop 7, Adobe started using the JPEG profiles to record an XML-encoded "preview" of the JPEG image. PS 7 does this by default when the "Save..." option is selected. These JPEG files, when downloaded by some versions of Internet Explorer, will render the browser completely incapable of downloading images...

...Which is why they disallow any images with this EXIF metadata. Now, I use Photoshop for all my work with graphics. I have never had any problem with opening those images in MSIE (in fact, I am looking at one now). And I am certainly not going to convert all my images just to appease some crappy website.

My next attempt was to use Gallery, an open-source package written in PHP. It certainly seemed like the ideal choice: I'd get to administer it myself, it allows image uploads through ftp, it will automatically parse EXIF metadata, etc. Unfortunately, the reality was, as usual, a bit different from the ad. While Gallery allows you to customize the colors of the pages, the general layout can only be customized by hacking their HTML files (no, they don't use CSS). There are no per-album settings, of course -- the settings are global to the entire gallery. What's worse is that, in order to function, Gallery requires you to have chmod 777 directories under your webserver. That's right ! World-writable directories accessible to your webserver are a must. This little security hole (that you can drive the Starship Enterprise through), combined with the cumbersome UI and non-working upload options, ruled out Gallery as a viable choice for me.

My next attempt was to try Zope, an open-source content management system. Zope looks really cool. Everything can be customized right there in the admin interface, including scripts and templates (similar to how MovableType works). The scripting language is Python, and the templating system is simple and intuitive. And installing Zope was as easy as unpacking the tarball and running a single script. I feel confident that I could create a kick-ass photo gallery package based on Zope; however, I simply don't have the time to do that right now. There is no default gallery package for it, and none of the user-written packages worked for me (without having to install weird third-party modules). Of course, the fact that I don't know Python at all was also a huge limiting factor.

My next step was to try PhotoSIG, a site where photos can be critiqued (put your black berets on everyone) by other photographers. Unfortunately, PhotoSIG has this to say in their Terms of Service:

8. By submitting any contribution to photoSIG, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual right to reproduce that contribution on photoSIG and to edit or alter it as needed. You also grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual right to reproduce such contribution on other sites on the World Wide Web for the purpose of promoting photoSIG. You retain the copyrights for all contributions.

I am not quite sure what this means, but it looks like they will use my photos to spam people. This normally wouldn't be too bad, even though I am scared of all the "perpetual right" type of language. However, on top of the scary legalese, PhotoSig only allows photos of a certain size; limits you to 3 uploads in 72 hours, and costs money. Unfortunately, PhotoSig is not for me.

Fortunately (well... sort of), however, PhotoSig had a link to Fotki, which is a sort of "photo.net lite" site. It does not parse EXIF metadata, it does not allow photo ratings, and you cannot customize its layout. However, it does automatically create thumbnails and provide basic commenting functionality, which by this time I was content with... And their layout is not too odious.

So, for now, I uploaded some of my photos there. However, I am merely tolerant of this solution -- I am not happy with it. I think that, ultimately, something like Gallery is what I need, only with more customization options and less security holes. Does anyone know of such a package ?

Say hello to my little friend

(testing image upload)