brainstorms

Friday December 31, 2004

sir arthur's note, sea-eat blog etc...

• Sir Arthur C Clarke's updated message from Sri Lanka.
• The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog

this will be a difficult new year.

(2004-12-31 18:41:57.0) Permalink Comments [0]

new photography and the problem of authentication

here is an image i made two years ago: an interior shot of the inimitable suleymaniye mosque in istanbul. i occasionally sell limited edition prints, and there is something i can say about this image with great certainty:

i made this image.

i could prove this assertion if needed; i actually have the physical slide at hand. [it is in a sequence of other physical slides showing related interior shots, all frame-numbered] this gives me the kind of authentication power that is harder to match in the digital photography realm: the correspondence between the imaging equipment, the original image and its photographer is very weak (circumstantial) or nonexistent. for cameras that produce pre-processed images, there is no way to directly prove ownership. this is less of a problem for prosumer DSLRs that produce raw images, provided that the original raw image is never shared. (i am assuming the process of going from raw to, say tiff is nearly impossible to reverse, because of antialiasing, scaling etc).

related links: adobe's digital negative (dng) proposal.

(2004-12-31 11:08:19.0) Permalink

Thursday December 30, 2004

lessig updating code...

larry lessig is updating his code and other laws of cyberspace in a rather neat way, through a wiki-editing of the first edition with chapter captains. more details in his blog.

(2004-12-30 13:39:48.0) Permalink Comments [0]

switching links to barnes & noble.

i just realized (sheepishly) that i have been linking any book refs to amazon.com and i do not really have a good reason to do so. [it is helpful to occasionally review the way we do things, and ask why.] i suspect a large number of book links do end up in amazon, but my links will go to barnes & noble from now on. vive la difference.

recently mentioned: lupton, thinking with type

(2004-12-30 11:18:30.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday December 29, 2004

faking lomo in gimp

rama posted a link to a photoshop tutorial to create the so-called lomo effect, a cross between under-exposed Kodak Ektachrome E100VS and coke-bottle optics. here is a tutorial for the same effect done in gimp. [tastes almost as good, but costs much less]

[reviewing some of the lomo images, i realize i am being too hard on kodak ektachrome e100vs and coke bottles]

(2004-12-28 21:39:26.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday December 28, 2004

lupton's free advice

selections from ellen lupton's wonderful thinking with type appendix free advice [comments in brackets mine]

think more, design less: many desperate acts of design ae perpetrated in the absence of a strong concept. a good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work. [software designers often start with a good idea, but manage to tear it apart and bury it in the process.]

say more, write less: just as designers should avoid filling up space with arbitrary visual effects, writers should remember that no one loves their words as much as they do. [good advice for most bloggers]

make the shoe fit, not the foot: Rather than force content into rigid containers, create systems that are flexible and responsive to the material they are intended to accomodate. [most software designers confuse flexibility with features]

build the discourse: Design is social. It lives in society, it creates society, and it needs a society of its own - a community of designers commited to advancing and debating our shared hopes and desires. Read, write, and talk about design whenever you can. [amen]

(2004-12-28 20:00:08.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday December 27, 2004

haiku for open solaris

clicking the tree
on open solaris -
yellowing leaves.

[oz, 2004]

[i wrote this haiku a couple of months ago, near a window overlooking a garden full of fall leaves, while browsing open solaris source tree.]

(2004-12-27 18:41:53.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Wednesday December 22, 2004

my ipod, a year later

a year passed since i received my ipod as an anniversary gift. it still has its zen, lousy battery life, clunky user interface, and no scratches. current stats:

• 2585 songs
• 21 genres
• 498 artists
• 173 albums
• 12.34 gb

[every single bit legal, mostly aac format though i will re-rip everything in mp3]

(2004-12-22 19:19:35.0) Permalink Comments [0]

gabriel and the chant of the trodden spiral...

fourth book on my work shelf is gabriel's patterns of software. that book is now eight years old, and as i am going over the alexander chapters [bead game, rugs, beauty] again, i realize it is still a very good read. [i happen to have alexander's marvellous book on turkish rugs, but more on that in another blog. i think patterns is more thought provoking than hackers and painters though both have sections with as much strength and rigor as a wet noodle al dente]

i wonder when gabriel will come up with another edition; surely many more tales to tell since he joined SUN...

[i visited his homepage and just found an interesting link: looks like his dreamsongs press will publish the collected, seminal scheme papers of steele, and what sounds like a poetry book by gabriel. i can hardly wait especially for the scheme papers; my original copies of those papers from scheme implementation days were donated to york u.]

(2004-12-22 07:10:24.0) Permalink

Tuesday December 21, 2004

readings on data structures: merkle trees

came across some good papers on merkle trees. [merkle trees are used to produce multiple one time signatures associated with to a single public key]

[1] M. Jakobsson, T. Leighton, S. Micali and M. Szydlo,
Fractal Merkle Tree Representation and Traversal
RSA-CT 2003.

[2] D. Coluccio
Implementation of a Hash-based Digital Signature Scheme using Fractal Merkle Tree Representation
[an implementation of a digital signature and authentication scheme that makes use of the techniques outlined in the Jakobsson et al. paper above]

[3] M. Szydlo
Merkle Tree Traversal in Log Space and Time
Eurocrypt 2004, to appear.

[4] J. Chapweske,
Tree Hash EXchange format (THEX)

[graydon's monotone uses merkle trees]

(2004-12-21 10:50:40.0) Permalink

Monday December 13, 2004

re-quote of the day

fortune(6) just revealed an old quote that had to be waiting for a recast:

perl is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the problems of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

[this was once said about APL, a remarkable language nearly as unreadable as perl, but in many ways, more exciting...]

(2004-12-13 07:16:01.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Wednesday December 08, 2004

analog sound...

finally restored my technics sl-b2k turntable to perfect working order. a recent visit to bay bloor radio turned up a high-quality replacement belt from technics. [it turns out bay bloor radio stocks many turntables, quality parts, cartridges etc. a similar turntable goes for a couple of hundred dollars these days]

in the last number of years, i trimmed my record (vinyl) collection down to bare hard-to-replace essentials: some deutsche grammophon classical, blue note and other jazz, some rare electronic music pieces, including an album by electronic music pioneer oscar sala. one album that i cannot wait to listen again is a 1957 recording of grieg's complete Peer Gynt, conducted by sir thomas beecham, sung beautifully by Ilse Hollweg (Angel Records).

it is pure magic.

[i should compare the sound of my relatively pristine vinyl against its digital version appropriately found under EMI's Great Recordings of the Century collection]

[the picture on the right is that of a stanton 300 cartridge poised to land on george clinton's computer games.]

(2004-12-08 10:12:13.0) Permalink

Monday December 06, 2004

bitkeeping continues...

i have been using bk for the last couple of years for all my new projects, and now i am moving all my past projects and code archives to bitkeeper repositories. of course i'm a bit biased (and fully licensed :-) but i cannot see how i can manage twenty+ years worth of code, text and other important bits with anything like cvs and its ilk. [i thought much about arch, but got tired of it a year or so ago. maybe it has gotten less idiosyncratic and less painful, but no reason to change now.] when i'm done, all my bits (minus a decade's worth of VMS bits lost in tape archives) will be on my fingertips!

knuth once wrote that when programming in cweb, he would sometimes run out of his office with joy. this is the kind of thing i feel like doing at times, living with bitkeeper. really good to have really good tools.

[musical recommendation for the occasion: mercan dede, secret tribe - nar or seyahatname...]

(2004-12-06 19:59:57.0) Permalink

Friday December 03, 2004

bookstore failing with dot-net...

my favorite online bookstore, chapters.indigo just failed in a way i had not seen before:

Server Error in '/' Application.

Not enough storage is available to complete this operation.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the
current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information
about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.OutOfMemoryException: Not enough storage is available
to complete this operation.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request.
Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using
the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[OutOfMemoryException: Not enough storage is available to complete this operation.]
Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.CommerceContext.get_AuthManagerComClass() +31
Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.AuthManager..ctor(String siteName, DebugContext debugContext) +143
Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.CommerceAuthenticationModule.OnBeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) +110
System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication+IExecutionStep.Execute() +60
System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +87

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.910

sigh. mediocre frameworks running out of storage and do not even expect it.

(2004-12-03 09:19:32.0) Permalink